Building Blood Donor Communities in the times of Covid: Donner Sang Compter LMS365 Case Study

Donner Sang Compter (DSC) is a Lebanese-based NGO whose primary focus is to promote blood donation as a humanitarian and national cause in Lebanon. There are a multitude of blood banks across Lebanon that take care of the logistics of the withdrawal, testing and transportation of blood to hospitals, but DSC’s unique human-centric approach is to build communities of voluntary blood donors who give without asking for anything in return, which is the literal translation of the French ‘donner sang compter’, the NGO’s name.

“What we focus on is the human aspect of the blood donation process, and this can only be done by creating awareness on how the act of giving is critical to building stronger communities,” says Myra Khalife, General Secretary of DSC.

DSC’s most valuable asset is its volunteers. Today, the NGO has around 600 active volunteers across 15 different districts in Lebanon who help inform the public about the importance of blood donation, fix misconceptions and incentivise people to donate. “This is why it is crucial to equip our volunteers with the right information, the right skills and the right tools to be able to perform this very delicate and humanitarian task,” says Myra.

DSC’s volunteers need to be equipped with medical knowledge, technical skills and important soft skills before they can begin their work in the field. The soft skills support the development of leadership qualities and help with time management, and how to communicate and work with one another as a tight-knit team in a human-centric manner.

Before the pandemic, almost all the training was done face-to-face, but this changed with the national lockdown protocols. “We needed a platform that could help us get the right training transferred quickly and efficiently to our volunteers during the pandemic,” says Myra. DSC focuses on capacity building and skill development for the volunteer network, and they wanted to find the right tool to help bridge the gap left by the face-to-face training.

DSC did a lot of research, and given that they already utilise Microsoft Teams, Dynamic365, OneDrive and SharePoint within their organisation, the NGO thought it was a logical idea to investigate how LMS365 integrates with the existing Microsoft environment. “When we saw all the functionalities of LMS365, we knew it would be the best option to go with,” says Myra.

The teams at TTRO and LMS365 helped DSC set up the new system and had it up and running seamlessly in less than a week.

“I was very happy with the support. It was very professional and very timely. The follow-up from the team was very proficient and the platform itself is very rich. There are so many different parameters to choose for each course and every course can be treated differently. Personally, when I was doing my research I didn’t find another platform that included all these features at the same time with such flexibility,” says Myra. “If an organisation believes in the importance of continuous training and capacity building of its members, whether for its staff or volunteers, I definitely think LMS365 is the place to go,” she added.

DSC created different sets of courses for the different types of activities they perform as part of their operations. Depending on the topic, they designed the format of the course and chose where to add the different assets such as videos, questionnaires, quizzes, feedback forms, etc.

“LMS365 gave us the flexibility to create different formats for our courses, and our learners benefited from a flexible learning experience. They also found it very useful to be able to go back to their training content more than once and as needed. We even recorded some courses and it was very helpful, especially because it was traceable,” explains Myra.

Reporting was another feature that DSC benefited from extensively. LMS365 provides data on the time spent by volunteers on certain trainings, their preferred set of courses, and their performance. “The reporting gave us a centralised place to view the data and accordingly, create a reward system to be able to retain our best volunteers,” states Myra.

The ability to provide certification at the end of a course or programme played a major role in the adoption of LMS365 among learners. “Adoption was high and fast, which is rare, because volunteers were excited to finish the training and get their certification to be able to take part in the field work,” explains Myra.

The implementation itself was very quick and easy. TTRO and LMS365 organised a training session with the DSC team.

“The training that we had was very, very helpful. Honestly, we introduced a lot of technologies and tools in the last two years, and I think LMS365 was the one that we had the least problems with, the least questions unanswered. We have been going on for the past 6 months now with LMS365 and things are running as smooth as ever,” Myra concluded.

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